Abstract
The deferred update technique is a widely used approach for building replicated database systems. Its fame stems from the fact that read-only transactions can execute locally to any single database replica, providing good performance for workloads where transactions are mostly of this type. In this paper, we analyze the deferred update technique and show a number of characteristics and limitations common to any replication protocol based on it. Previous works on this replication method usually start from a protocol and then argue separately that it is based on the deferred update technique and satisfies serializability. Differently, ours starts from the abstract definition of a serializable database and gradually changes it into an abstract deferred update protocol. In doing that, we can formally characterize the deferred update technique and rigorously prove its properties. Moreover, our specification can be extended to create new protocols or used to prove existing ones correct.
The work presented in this paper has been partially funded by the SNSF, Switzerland (project #200021-170824).
Access provided by Autonomous University of Puebla. Download to read the full chapter text
Chapter PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Kemme, B., Alonso, G.: A new approach to developing and implementing eager database replication protocols. ACM Transactions on Database Systems 25(3), 333–379 (2000)
Patino-Martínez, M., Jiménez-Peris, R., Kemme, B., Alonso, G.: Scalable replication in database clusters. In: Herlihy, M.P. (ed.) DISC 2000. LNCS, vol. 1914, Springer, Heidelberg (2000)
Pedone, F., Frølund, S.: Pronto: A fast failover protocol for off-the-shelf commercial databases. In: SRDS 2000. Proceedings of the 19th IEEE Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems, pp. 176–185. IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos (2000)
Pedone, F., Guerraoui, R., Schiper, A.: The database state machine approach. Journal of Distributed and Parallel Databases and Technology 14(1), 71–98 (2003)
Schiper, N., Schmidt, R., Pedone, F.: Optimistic algorithms for partial database replication. In: Shvartsman, A.A. (ed.) OPODIS 2006. LNCS, vol. 4305, pp. 81–93. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)
Abadi, M., Lamport, L.: The existence of refinement mappings. Theoretical Computer Science 82(2), 253–284 (1991)
Lamport, L.: A simple approach to specifying concurrent systems. Communications of the ACM 32(1), 32–45 (1989)
Lynch, N.: Distributed Algorithms. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, Inc., San Mateo, CA, USA (1996)
Lamport, L. (ed.): Specifying Systems: The TLA+ Language and Tools for Hardware and Software Engineers. Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Boston, MA, USA (2002)
Schmidt, R., Pedone, F.: A formal analysis of the deferred update technique. Technical report, EPFL (2007)
Bernstein, P., Hadzilacos, V., Goodman, N.: Concurrency Control and Recovery in Database Systems. Addison-Wesley, Reading (1987)
Papadimitriou, C.H.: The serializability of concurrent database updates. Journal of the ACM 26(4), 631–653 (1979)
Lynch, N., Merrit, M., Weihl, W., Fekete, A.: Atomic Transactions. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, Inc., San Mateo, CA, USA (1994)
Beeri, C., Bernstein, P.A., Goodman, N.: A model for concurrency in nested transaction systems. Journal of the ACM 36(2), 230–269 (1989)
Pedone, F., Schiper, A.: Handling message semantics with generic broadcast protocols. Distributed Computing 15(2), 97–107 (2002)
Lamport, L.: Generalized consensus and paxos. Technical Report MSR-TR-2005-33, Microsoft Research (2004)
Hadzilacos, V., Toueg, S.: Fault-tolerant broadcasts and related problems. In: Distributed systems, 2nd edn., pp. 97–145. ACM Press/Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., New York, NY, USA (1993)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2007 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Schmidt, R., Pedone, F. (2007). A Formal Analysis of the Deferred Update Technique. In: Tovar, E., Tsigas, P., Fouchal, H. (eds) Principles of Distributed Systems. OPODIS 2007. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4878. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-77096-1_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-77096-1_2
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-77095-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-77096-1
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)